ROGER D HARRIS and SARA FLOUNDERS challenge propaganda against the blockaded socialist island
THE Labour Party’s history is not something much discussed at Labour conferences. There are occasional nods to Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson and of course Tony Blair.
The Labour Party constitution, written by Sidney Webb in 1918 and amended since, is usually only discussed when the leadership is trying to work out how to gather more power for itself and less for the unions and ordinary members.
A recent exception was the period from 2010 to 2019 under the leadership of Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn, when more power was given to members and membership numbers boomed. The current leadership of Sir Keir Starmer owes a good deal to the fact that the Labour right was concerned that the left might gain control of the order of service in Labour’s broad church, as Ralph Miliband put it.
It’s not just the Starmer regime: the workers of Britain have always faced legal affronts on their right to assemble and dissent, and the Labour Party especially has meddled with our freedoms from its earliest days, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
VINCE MILLS cautions over the perils and pitfalls of ‘a new left party’
While Hardie, MacDonald and Wilson faced down war pressure from their own Establishment, today’s leadership appears to have forgotten that opposing imperial adventures has historically defined Labour’s moral authority, writes KEITH FLETT



